'What am I supposed to do when he starts spewing his bullshit?' Barack Obama preparing for his first debate with Mitt Romney

In their runaway bestseller Game Change / Race of a Lifetime, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann captured the full drama of Barack Obama's improbable, dazzling victory over the Clintons, John McCain and Sarah Palin. With the same masterly reporting, unparalleled access, and narrative skill, Double Down picks up the story in the Oval Office, where the president is beset by crises both inherited and unforeseen - facing defiance from his political foes, disenchantment from voters, disdain from the nation's powerful finance figures and dysfunction within the West Wing. As 2012 looms, leaders of the Republican Party, salivating over Obama's political fragility, see a chance to wrestle back control of the White House - and the country.

So how did the Republicans screw it up? How did Obama survive the onslaught and defy the predictions of a one-term presidency? Double Down follows the gaudy carnival of Republican contenders - ambitious and flawed, famous and infamous, charismatic and cartoonish - as Mitt Romney, the straitlaced, can-do, gaffe-prone multimillionaire from Massachusetts, scraped and scratched his way to the nomination, while Obama is seen storming out of a White House meeting with his high command after accusing them of betrayal, and gradually transforming a tense détente with Bill Clinton into political gold.

Double Down takes you into back rooms and closed-door meetings, laying bare the secret history of the 2012 campaign in a panoramic account of an election that was as hard fought as it was lastingly consequential.

Praise for Game Change (Race of a Lifetime):

'The most exciting political book of recent years. Election reporting will never be the same again' News Statesman, Books of the Year

'A spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegation. Leaves the reader with a vivid, visceral sense of the campaign and a keen understanding of the paradoxes and contingencies of history' New York Times

Die hilfreichsten Kundenrezensionen auf Amazon.com (beta)

Triple Down --- A Three-volume encyclopedia of the 2012 election5. November 2013

Von
Alan F. Sewell
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Kindle Edition
Verifizierter Kauf

This is a comprehensive and surprisingly unbiased account of the 2012 campaign and the backstories behind the candidates who took part in it. The book is in three parts, each of which is comprehensive enough to be a stand-alone book in its own right.

The first "book" (Part I) is the backstory of Obama's Presidency from 2008 to 2012. This was my least favorite part because it was clinically written without much emotion or new insights. Authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann describes Obama as a moderate, pragmatic sort of person who has as little use for the self-serving Black Civil Rights establishment as he does for the Conservative Tea Party activists. According to Halperin (a Conservative) and Heilemann, Obama may come across at times as a petulant professor, but he's hardly the extreme Liberal-verging-on-Marxist maniac that has taken root in popular Conservative folklore.

Halperin and Heilemann give a fair account of Obama's political battles with the Republican House of Representatives over healthcare reform, banking bailouts, and federal budgets. But a politically savvy reader will already be familiar with this material. I'd suggest skimming this part or skipping it altogether and getting started with the second part, which makes the book a worthwhile read.

The second part --- describing the Republican primary candidates' machinations to win the nomination --- has all the drama and excitement you'd expect in a political book

It starts out with a fair-minded account of Mitt Romney's career. Nothing new here, because Mitt has been around long enough for most of us to know his story. He's one of those incorruptible personalities whose scandal-free life seems dull by its very absence of misconduct. The only surprise is that the real money brokers in the Republican party seem to have viewed Mitt as a penny-ante operator:

======Trump was publicly sniffy about Romney as a capitalist, denigrating him as a "small-business guy," and privately disdainful of Bain. "They'd buy a company and fire everyone," he told his associates.=======

Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee had spent years as low-paid governors of their states. They had belatedly achieved comfortable wealth in the private sector after retiring from public service. Going into 2012 they had to face the agonizing decision of whether to risk every penny of their personal wealth on the time-consuming and expensive campaign to be President. Little wonder that they declined to enter the contest.

I especially enjoyed the curious stories of tension between fellow Minnesotans Tim Pawlenty and Michelle Bachmann who appear to have detested each other as bitter home state rivals. The same close rivalry poisoned relations between fellow Utah Mormons Mitt Romney and John Huntsman. Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich also have their interesting personal and professional stories told, usually in good-natured ways.

And I LOVED the antics of Republican campaign consultants Karl Rove and the delightfully mischievous Ed Rollins. The candidates may have been courteous to each other in the television debates, but their professional campaign staffs dished the dirt behind the scenes. If the authors' sources are correct, minor candidate Jon Huntsman's impish staff sabotaged Mitt Romney's campaign by leaking information about his overseas tax havens and brought down Herman Cain by going public with the womanizing stories.

I came away disappointed with Donald Trump, whose three billion dollars would have enabled him to campaign. But Trump let his devotion to personal fame and fortune trump his desire to serve the American people by campaigning to be their President. He felt that running for public office would cost him money by taking him away from his business.

But the most meaningful insight is about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The book should be read for that reason alone. Halperin and Heilemann don't cheerlead for any candidate, but the stories of Governor Christie as told through the eyes of others is a powerful endorsement of him as a candidate for 2016.

The Third Part of the book, about the presidential race between Obama and Romney, is, like the first part, only so-so. That's probably because most of the stories are still fresh on our minds --- the Bain Capital controversies; Obama's dreadful first debate; Romney's "47% moochers and takers" gaffe; and Romney's search for a running mate that culminated the selection of Paul Ryan.

The strength of this book --- its completeness --- is also its weakness. Some may feel that it is TOO complete. For example, I was not at all interested in the pages devoted to minor non-candidate Haley Barbour who never got into the Republican primaries. There is also a "facts, just the facts" tone to the book. There is no opinionating by the author about WHY the nomination process and the election turned out the way it did. The dry facts are presented, and the readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

The book is more like an encyclopedia of pick-and-choose topics. I spent most of my time on Part II, which by itself justified the purchase. The entertaining dramas of the Republicans competing against each other made for some delightful stories, as well as getting to know these second-tier candidates (some of whom will be first-tier in 2016 or 2020) made this a worthwhile read. The best was the part devoted to understanding what makes Governor Chris Christie tick. I came away feeling even more comfortable with him as a Republican candidate for 2016 than I already was.

The book may be over-long and perhaps contains some material that is not of the highest interest. BUT it is THE encyclopedia of the 2012 political campaigns, the candidates who participated in them, and the backstories that went into making the candidates and their campaigns. It's the one "all you need to know" source for the life and times of every political personality of any relevance to the 2012 campaign.

66 von 73 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Very readable, but comes up short10. November 2013

Von
William Springer
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Gebundene Ausgabe
Verifizierter Kauf

In early October 2012, things seemed to be going very well indeed for Mitt Romney. He faced an unpopular incumbent presiding over a still-lethargic economy. He had access to a staggering amount of money (both sides spent over a billion dollars, with Romney's spending surpassing that of the president), although he had limited control over the significant fraction of it that passed through the Romney-aligned Super PACs. Finally, he was in complete control of the first debate, coming out of Denver as the clear winner. Yet a few weeks later, he would lose the election by millions of votes, with the president claiming over 60% of the electoral college.

There have already been a number of books written about the 2012 election, and will no doubt be many more, but Double Down has been hotly anticipated as a sequel to 2010′s Game Change. As in Game Change, the authors appear to have been granted extensive access to hundreds of people involved in the campaigns; they credit over 500 interviews (all, naturally, on deep background). But does the book live up to the hype?

For the most part, the writing is very good and kept me turning pages. The authors do have an annoying tendency to never use a common word where an obscure word will do, which detracts from the readability; I consider myself to have a pretty good vocabulary, but I found myself pulling out my phone more than once to look up yet another obscure adjective. Otherwise, the book flows fairly well. The first section, by far the shortest, covers the Obama administration in the lead-up to the election season. I got the sense that the authors felt they had already covered Obama sufficiently in Game Change and now wanted to concentrate on the republicans.

Section two covers the republican primary season. As with the primary voters, the text jumps from one candidate to another as Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and Santorum become ascendant, but always returns to Mitt Romney as the current not-Mitt flames out. Romney is definitely the star of the book, and where Obama intrudes in this section, he and his policies are seem from Romney's point of view.

In section three, the stage is set, the candidates selected. From the Obama side, we see the reconciliation with Clinton and the struggles the candidate has in switching from his preferred professorial lecture mode to the style required of modern presidential debates. Still, the focus remains on the Romney campaign, the struggles they have with introducing their candidate to the country, and some of the innumerable missteps they took along the way.

What disappointed me about this book was that, except for things I would classify as gossip (such as who told Harry Reed that Romney went a decade without paying taxes, and several incidents demonstrating why Obama's feelings of betrayal when private stories were leaked to the press), there isn't a lot of new information in this book. I had hoped to read more about the Obama administration's get out the vote operation and their vaunted computer system (and the Romney campaign's disastrous ORCA system), but these went unmentioned; while they've been covered to some extent in other books, I haven't seen one that covers them in the level of detail I would like to see. What I did enjoy was the details of how each of the republican candidates, most of whom I would consider to have zero chance of becoming president, came to sincerely believe at one time or another that he or she would win the nomination and the election.

In the end, this is a book not about tactics or policy, but about people - about the choices that Obama and Romney (and, to a lesser extent, the other republican candidates) made about how to present themselves to the voters. Right up to election day, Romney believed that he would be the victor, and this book attempts (largely successfully) to demonstrate how he and the people around him viewed his candidacy. For the most part, this is the story of Mitt Romney.

I spent a while debating whether to give this book three stars or four; I was quite engrossed in it but was somewhat disappointed by the content. In the end I rated it 3.4 stars (rounded down to three) because although I enjoyed the book, I didn't feel more informed after reading it, and I felt somewhat that the authors were more interested in demonstrating their access and vocabulary than in offering new insights into the race. Still, for anyone interested in the people rather than the policy, or who did not follow the election closely until the final months, I recommend this book.

This review originally appeared at Vulcan Ears Book Reviews (vulcanears.com).

56 von 63 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Marathon Men6. November 2013

Von
The Ginger Man
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Gebundene Ausgabe
Verifizierter Kauf

A half century ago, Theodore White wrote The Making of the President 1960 and, in so doing, changed the way in which we view political campaigns. Double Down follows the tradition of covering an election season as a contest in which tactics are far more interesting and prominent than are policies or moral choices. To the authors, "the 2012 election had the feel of a big casino, as the players took on the complexion of compulsive gamblers, pushing more and more chips into the center of the table." As with the previous book by these authors (Game Change), the very title refers to the campaign as a race rather than as the process of choosing a leader.

In Game Change, the authors delivered an entirely new characterization of Sarah Palin based on interviews with Republican strategist Steven Schmidt. Double Down does not bring as much new information to the table but it does present an almost seamless, inside look at the 2012 election from primaries through victory speech. The book is especially strong in its ability to show how the individual strengths and character flaws of each candidate inevitably stamp themselves upon the campaign. The authors also give due consideration to the changing role of money in the election as a result of Citizens United and the ever increasing impact of experts in each party on campaign planning and execution.

The book is more cursory in its analysis of policy differences between the candidates. The 2012 election became, in many ways, a referendum on Obama's performance and passage of the Affordable Health Care Act. This represented a complicated hurdle for Mitt Romney since the Act was based on a Heritage Foundation idea which Romney had championed in Massachusetts. Even far right Senator Jim DeMint had once endorsed Romney by proclaiming, "He has demonstrated, when he stepped into government in a very difficult state, that he could work in a difficult partisan environment, take some good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured." To his credit, Romney refused to fully disavow his accomplishment since he believed it to be "a Republican way of reforming the market." He finally manages to extricate himself from this labyrinth by arguing that such a policy solution only works at the state level but not before expunging from the paperback version of his book No Apologies the hope that "we can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country."

The authors describe the impact of the policy debate on the campaign but do not perform the important function of reporting how policy discussion is twisted and adumbrated by the need to win votes. As a result, Double Down does a great job of covering politics as contest but it also reflects a weakness in American journalism by avoiding consideration of policy and principle. This kind of complicated analysis rarely occurs in print and video outlets during the long campaign marathon. When the dust has cleared at the finish line, however,readers should finally expect that we take as close a look at substance as at style.

14 von 14 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

Surprisingly Good! Even if you are tired of politics!13. November 2013

Von
SN2013
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Kindle Edition
Verifizierter Kauf

I think at this point, like most people, I have experienced campaign and political fatigue so I was a bit apprehensive buying this book, but it turned out to be surprisingly as good a read as the authors' previous book, Game Change. I don't think it would be unfair to say that this is definitely the most comprehensive and detailed book on the 2012 race.

The book is a rather unbiased account of the 2012 Presidential Race, and provides some very interesting insight into the events leading up to the election. The Democratic primary race was obviously not as exciting as it was in 2008, but the book has some good anecdotes about the Obama White House, and it manages to reveal a very human, candid, unguarded side to him without villainizing him or passing any unnecessary judgement. It has the same non-judgmental approach towards the Hunstsman, Perry and Romney campaign, i.e. the authors narrate the events without unnecessary commentary. As someone who did not follow the Republican race very closely, reading about those chapters was quite interesting, especially the portions on how the Republican candidates viewed each other and their relationships with each other (who knew Huntsman and Romney were distant cousins.)

I won't waste your time by repeating little tidbits that have been reported all over the press since the book's release, but I will say that in the larger context of the book they do not seem as salacious and scandalous as they seem in a book review or newspaper article. In fact, my opinion of the politicians remained the same as it had before the book and in the context of the book, even something that may seem controversial on its own, seemed to fit into the narrative seamlessly.

Since the writers are journalists, the book is a quick read and is very enjoyable.

Pros:- quick read.- interesting and new anecdotes.- focuses on the big players, like Obama, Romney, Clinton etc... but also focuses on smaller players, which as one knows, play a very important role in campaigns.- quite unbiased.- narrates and recreates some memorable moments with new insight (e.g. the time when the French press incorrect reported that Michelle Obama told Carla Bruni that living in the White House was "hell")- contains some information that I have read in other books, so it is at least backed by other sources. (e.g. Obama gets very furious about leaks, and expressed his displeasure multiple times to his re-election team)

Cons- the writers seemed to have relied on an SAT dictionary and use words like- "pyretic" "tuchus" and "chasmal", so this was the first time I used my Kindle dictionary.- not much about Ron Paul.- the book has an internal approach thus it talks about what happened from inside the campaigns and not so much about the external events and players that were also influencing the race.

27 von 33 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich

The Voters Chose To Double Down7. November 2013

Von
prisrob
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Kindle Edition
Verifizierter Kauf

Halperin and Hellemann's book of the 2012 election is forthright and impressive. Many of the big 'takes' have been promoted on their book tours, but there is a great deal of terrific information that is left. For political junkies like me, the inside scoop of what went on in the Obama and Romney's election campaign is stuff to gnaw on. One of the more interesting tidbits is about Christie's vetting for VP with Romney. What Romney's team found was so much negative info that could not and was not explained that Romney knew Christie could never take the heat of a Presidential campaign.

The authors concentrate on Obama's re-election campaign, and in particular his hatred of debates. The Denver debate where he failed, and then onto the rest of the campaign. The high level of good will for the First Lady, Michelle, helped to give her the highest of likability of anyone in the campaign. The finely tuned operation that started in Chicago that made this election so winnable. What did surprise me, and I think it is relevant today, is the lack of really good, close people to surround the President and make sure all of his efforts and policies were on the right track and evolving as they should. Note the ACA disaster, no one seemed to be leading this effort. The President is a great idea man, but he is not one who follows up or leads the policies on-going.

And then there was Mr. Romney . Bill Clinton "remarked to a friend, that, while Mitt was a decent man, he was in the wrong line of work. 'He really shouldn't be speaking to people in public.' ". Time after time, Mitt Romney made many faux pas that showed this man was an elitist. President Obama disliked Romney intensely, and he had difficulty hiding it. The 47% remarks by Romney, really seemed to close his electability. And, even now, he still talks in that manner. His election group were off base, it seems, much of the time. Some of his PAC groups were full of dirty tricks, that were outed and then eliminated. His wife, Anne, seems like a gracious woman who had no clue that the campaign was not going well. The race to the Republican candidacy is closely followed. The line of Republicans who wanted to be President is followed, and Romney was the best of the group. Big money followed them, but Romney did not have the stuff to be President, and, it seems he knew that all along.

The final days of both campaigns are delineated in great detail. The book is not too unkind except to Bill Daley, Obama's Chief of Staff, but, I wonder if it is the people surrounding the president everyday, like Valerie Jarret, who are causing some of the misery. VP Biden, is as full of gaffs as always. Obama and Biden have a good relationship, but as we have seen before and during the 'shutdown', he was kept as far away from the action as possible. Many Dems in the Senate feel that when he negotiates, he 'gives away the store'. A likable guy, but not someone you want negotiating. I can't wait to read his autobiography, and how he feels he was treated. Romney's lead man Stuart Stevens, comes off looking clownish at times, and, no one in that campaign had any idea of how the race for Presidency was really going down. It is us, the voters, who doubled down.